Call handling treatments are used to supply added functionality over and above the normal scenario in which a first caller and second caller are immediately placed in contact with one another. Such treatments are widely used in, for example, contact centers, whereby an inbound call from a customer is provided with a number of sequential treatments, usually prior to connection to a live agent.
For example, the treatments applied to a call may begin with the caller hearing a ring tone, followed by an interactive voice response (IVR) session in which the caller is provided with various recorded announcements and the opportunity to make inputs e.g. by voice or by pressing keys, in order to interactively provide menu choices allowing the contact center to gather date about the call and about the best way of handling the call. If the caller has to subsequently queue to speak to an available agent, additional treatments may be automatically provided to the caller, such as recorded announcements (RAN), music on hold (MOH), advertisements, interactive surveys, and so on. Each of these is an example of a call handling treatment.
Apart from contact centers, such call handling treatments can be provided in the context of almost any call. Thus, a private individual may have telephony software which is configured to automatically handle incoming or outgoing calls, providing music on hold or recorded announcements to callers. The same may be true of the software running on a company's private branch exchange (PBX), where the company may additionally wish to serve advertisements to customers on hold.
Contact centers typically gather statistical data about every contact or communications session involving the contact center. Normally, such statistics are monitored and compared to various benchmarks or key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to ensure that predetermined service levels have been met, or to identify instances where service levels are not being met.
One of the most important service levels operated by most contact centers is a metric based on “within threshold abandons”. If a call is abandoned before the caller is connected to a live agent, then the time at which that abandonment occurs can either be within threshold or outside threshold.
If the contact center can automatically deal with the customer in an acceptable period of time without transfer to an agent, then this will be referred to as a within threshold abandon, and such abandonments are typically counted as having a positive influence on service level attainment. The caller might, for example, call a contact center to enquire about or complain about a network problem. If the contact center can provide an informative recorded announcement which answers the caller's concerns, and if this can be played early in the call, then the caller may abandon the call, the question having been answered with no further need to speak with an agent.
Callers who remain on hold for a longer period of time, however, and who abandon their calls outside the threshold time, may be assumed to have done so out of frustration or dissatisfaction with the length of time on hold, and such abandonments are typically viewed as having a negative impact on service level attainment.
Contact centers may be contractually required to provide, on behalf of the client for whom they are operating, a within threshold abandonment rate of (say) 85%, meaning that customers must either be connected to an agent or, if they abandon the call, must do so within threshold (which may be set at perhaps 20-25 seconds) on at least 85% of instances.
Within threshold abandons are, of course, only one key performance indicator. Other indicators which may be monitored are the successful sale of a product to a customer, or the successful selection by a customer of a particular menu option, e.g. where a cable subscriber opts to take on additional pay-per-view services.
The design of call handling treatments is typically relatively static and inflexible. It can be difficult to assess whether the call handling treatments and their sequence as provided to callers is optimal, and typically the selection of a sequencing of call handling treatments is changed only during major redesigns of systems. For new contact centers there may be a long period of change and adjustment before a satisfactory call handling workflow is finalized.